A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

“She’s got to be thirsty, too. Right, Morgan?”

Without ceremony, she produced a Swiss Army knife and cut one hand free. I was able to sit up, and when I did, my T-shirt dropped to cover me. The thought of having a beer with them was sickening, but I could not risk provoking them. I reached for the can and made myself swallow a small amount.

Candice looked at the alarm clock on the bureau I was still taped to. “You better think about heading in to work.”

“I got a clean shirt here? Don’t tell me you’ve been in Cleveland.”

Candice went to the small closet and threw a long-sleeved shirt at him.

“Are you going to have time to drop her back at the bus station?” Candice asked.

She cut my other wrist free, gave me back my duffel, and I was hustled into a white panel van. On the drive to what I hoped would be Port Authority, Doug kept the radio on to an oldies station, one power anthem after another. I was grateful I didn’t have to talk to him. I was sitting in the rear of the van watching him nod his head in time to the music.

When we reached Port Authority, Doug turned off the radio. “When I let you out, don’t turn around until the count of sixty. Unless you want to see me again.”

I didn’t turn around for the count of six hundred.

• • •

The moment the lecture ended, Amabile took my hand. “Come with me.” He pulled me away from the classroom before anyone had a chance to talk to me. He said he had an extra helmet for me and offered a ride to Rikers on his Harley. He and I both had patients this time each week, and I had a lot of catching up to do. I had never intended to be a practicing psychologist, but seven hundred clinical hours were required for the degree. Rikers wasn’t a prison; it was a jail, which meant that the inmates were there awaiting trial or serving less than a year. My patients were guys hoping that by seeing a shrink, the trial judge would look on them favorably. Since most of the Rikers population (fourteen thousand on an average day) was awaiting trial, everyone there was “innocent.”

I held fast to Amabile’s waist as we sped over the unmarked Francis Buono Bridge from Queens — the only access to the island. In the orientation session we had learned that Rikers Island had been a military training ground during the Civil War. It became a jail in 1932.

In 1957, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashed onto the island shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, killing twenty and injuring seventy-eight out of a total of ninety-five passengers and six crew. Shortly after the crash, department personnel and inmates alike ran to the crash site to help survivors. As a result of their actions, of the fifty-seven inmates who assisted with the rescue effort, thirty were released and sixteen received a reduction of six months by the NYC parole board.

We also learned that a drawing by Salvador Dalí, done as an apology because he was unable to attend a talk about art for the prisoners, hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981, when it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. The drawing was stolen in 2003 by some guards and replaced with a fake.

The facility was something of a small town. There were schools, medical clinics, ball fields, chapels, gyms, drug-rehab programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a Laundromat, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a print shop, a bus depot, and even a car wash. It was the world’s largest penal colony.

I saw my patients in a small annex off an overcrowded ward where the fluorescent lights were on 24-7. A TV played from 7:00 a.m. to midnight. The men were dressed in orange jumpsuits and looked as if they had been living in a Greyhound bus terminal waiting for a bus that never came.

After Amabile and I were ID’d, searched, and cleared, we walked the maze of hallways with bars over the windows, and doors that only the guards could open.

My office, which I shared with three other degree candidates, was six feet by eight feet, smaller than a cell, and contained two identical folding chairs and a gym locker.

My first patient was a skinny white guy with a buzz cut and a cauliflower ear sentenced to nine months for exposing himself at the Metropolitan Museum, in the Greek-sculpture wing. He had stationed himself at the end of a line of marble nudes and waited for schoolgirls on a field trip. He showed no remorse and contended that he was innocent, that his fly was open without his knowledge.

He always started our sessions with a joke to try to rattle or charm me, I couldn’t always tell which. It was more than that — he only responded to my questions with jokes.

“Prisoner,” he began, “ ‘Look here, Doctor! You’ve already removed my spleen, tonsils, adenoids, and one of my kidneys. I only came to see if you could get me out of this place!’ Doctor, ‘I am… bit by bit!’ ”

“Are you asking me to get you out of this place?” I asked.

“A man escapes from a prison, finds a house, and breaks into it, looking for money, but only finds a young couple in bed. He orders the guy out of bed and ties him up in a chair. While tying the girl up to the bed, he gets on top of her, kisses her on the neck, then goes to the bathroom. While he’s in there, the husband tells his wife, ‘Listen, this guy is an escaped prisoner, look at his clothes! He probably hasn’t seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck. If he wants sex, don’t resist, don’t complain, just do what he tells you. If he gets angry, he’ll kill us. Be strong, honey. I love you.’ ‘He was not kissing my neck,’ the wife said. ‘He was whispering in my ear. He told me he was gay, thought you were cute, and asked if we kept any Vaseline in the bathroom.’ ”

“Are you frightened of being raped in here?”

“A psychiatrist makes his rounds in the mental hospital one morning. ‘How are you feeling today?’ he asks the first patient. The patient is naked, his penis is erect, and he is dropping peanuts on it. He turns to the shrink and says, ‘I am fucking nuts. I’m going to be here for a while.’ ”

“Are you accepting the fact that you are going to be here for a while?”

“You know, Doc, I think I’m allergic to your face.”

I awaited the dreaded punch line.

“Yeah, my dick gets swollen every time I see it.”

“We’re stopping early today,” I said, signaling through the reinforced window in the door for the guard to relieve me.

I remained on the folding chair reminding myself why I agreed to do this work. If only Bennett had been as obvious as this exhibitionist joker. How many sociopaths does it take to change a lightbulb? One. He holds the bulb while the world revolves around him.

• • •

I saw Doug and Candice one more time.

I served them omelets and home fries and Doug asked for hot sauce. They didn’t recognize me — a combination of my waitress uniform and my cut and colored hair and their generally hungover condition. When Doug dropped his knife and asked for another, I brought a steak knife and considered plunging it into his chest, two inches below his clavicle, where a natural gap exists between the ribs. Maybe it was my mother’s hand that stilled mine in this defining moment. Or maybe I realized that stabbing Doug would just be the form my self -destruction would take. Then there’s the fact that vengeance requires incrementally larger acts to satisfy the avenger.

I found a share with two medical students in Vinegar Hill, one of whom was Kathy. I’d taken the waitressing job at this diner in Bushwick to finance an extension class in poetry at the New School. Poetry felt like the most natural form for me, and in fact, I had written a couple of poems about Doug and Candice.

Their breakfast cost $21.12; they left me a tip of less than a dollar.